All companies want to keep your custom. Now, most companies try to win you over with brand loyalty, but the frustrating thing about tech companies is that they can use their technology to trap you. The very gadget or software that you’ve spent your hard earned money on, will make it as difficult as possible, for you to switch to an alternative.

The average iPhone owner for example, spends £80 in Apple’s App Store. When I recently switched to a Google Nexus One, I lost use of all £80 worth of my apps. That money is now wasted, those apps have absolutley no use to me anymore, because I cannot install them on my new phone.

Online stores are become more and more popular with handheld devices. I’m not talking about your ebuyer or bestbuy, I’m talking about your App Store or Market Place. The problem is, they’re all locked-down to some extent.

Fair enough, if I buy another android phone I can install all the apps I’ve bought on my Google Nexus One, as I did when I moved from an iPhone 3G to a 3GS. The same is probably true for Kindle to Kindle 2.

But what happens when Apple stop selling the iPhone, or someone releases a better eBook reader than the Kindle, or if Google end the Android project? All of your purchased applications, books, mp3s become useless.

We need to make things transferable!

This is the exact reason I used to rip my mp3s (before the magnificence that is Spotify), instead of paying for a service like Napster or Yahoo Music. Most of those services were DRM based. There were just too many restrictions on what you can or cannot do with the music you purchase.

So before you splash out on the iPad, Kindle or any other eBook reader – and before you upgrade to an iPhone, Nexus One or other smartphone – remember, the money you spend on books/apps/music for that device, may well be thrown away with the device.

Why should you have to hack your Kindle in order to read eBooks you obtained from somewhere other than Amazon (see: over-priced)? Why should you have to jailbreak your iPhone to use apps that Apple doesn’t want to ‘approve’? If you ask me, you shouldn’t,

Since I’ve been posting a lot about Spotify lately, I thought I’d ask the question; what kind of music are you into?

I’ve been compiling a few playlists myself, which is more fun than I remember. I haven’t has so much fun creating playlists since the days of Napster and mix-CDs. iTunes playlists always felt like a chore somehow.

This is my primary playlist, that I can shove on any time of day/night, my mainstream (or Popular Music) list. Then if I’m feeling a bit ghetto, there’s my Rap playlist. Old skool and Reggae playlists for those chillout sessions. When I’m working I like to put on some Classical piano music. The great thing about Spotify is that you can create collaborative playlists. I opened an R&B playlist, Cherelle and Ruk have pretty much done all the hard work for me .

cr ~ Pop
cr ~ Classical
cr ~ Rap
cr ~ Old Skool
cr ~ Reggae
cr ~ R&B

Excuse the title. This is just the latest in my Spotify series of posts.

I’m paying for Premium, and it just doesn’t work. The desktop app constantly gives me an error “There is a problem with the connection to Spotify. Please try again shortly” whenever I try and play a high-bitrate track. I’ve followed all the instructions and keep checking back on the Spotify status page. Obviously I don’t want to be paying for premium and listening to songs in a low bitrate, that kind of defeats the purpose.

I’ve also had some trouble with the iPhone app too. See the attached image. I have only ever used the Spotify app on my iPhone 3GS, so I have no idea what this error is about, but either way it erased all my downloaded tracks.

Therefore I have now un-subscribed from Spotify Premium. Back to the advertisements for me.

iPhone app. Simples.

Today I purchased a Spotify Premium Membership, for the sole purpose of using the iPhone app. It’s great! I’ll write a review after giving it more time.

It’s just a shame there’s no alternative to the £10 monthly fee. The yearly package is the exact same price – but I hear this is out of Spotify’s hands. The music labels won’t allow them to give any discounts. Annoying, but that’s business sometimes I suppose.

I really like Spotify. I recommend it to everyone, I use it all the time, yet I won’t pay for it. This makes me feel rotten, just a little bit, so I’m going to justify myself.

This has nothing to do with liking the product, or even about affordabilty, this is purely to do with justifying the cost.

I think the PS3 Slim looks nice, I want one, but I have an Xbox360 and an over-powered PC for gamer, so although I can afford one, I can’t actually justify the purchase to myself. This is the exact problem I have with Spotify. I never used to pay for music, so now that I stream my music I’m not saving any money and although I am loyal to the product, the pricing is too high for me to put my hand in my pocket.

Now if the £100 bought me a lifetime license I might consider it. Of course I’d be worried about the service shutting down, as we’ve seen in the past with pay-and-go music download services – similar business model, where you rent DRMd music instead of straming it. In these cases customers were left with no music when the system shut down, which would of course be the same result with Spotify.

£100 a year is just too much to pay for music, especially for the Napster generation. Not only do we want everything now, and everything for free – but we’re accustomed to it.

Again, don’t get me wrong, I will pay for products. I buy iPhone apps all the time. I even bought a Spotify day pass for 99p when I was ‘DJing’ at my friend’s BBQ.

So how can Spotify encourage more of us to purchase their packages? Drop the prices. A 50% drop in prices would bring Spotify to the level of most other web apps. £35 – £50 a year is an amount that people see comfortable to shell out for a web application. £100 isn’t. Simples.